Category Archives: etc

I meant to do this post much earlier, but as anyone out there with kids will understand, they’re kind of time-consuming, especially in the first few weeks. Our daughter was born March 1st, and thus is six weeks old today. As may come as no surprise to anyone who recognizes my blog header image, we named her Karina – inspired by, though not necessarily after, actress Anna Karina.

So far she’s shown little interest in any of the fine video content we’ve exposed her to, from Star Trek: The Next Generation to Mildred Pierce to Archer to The Amazing Race. Ah well. On the good side, she seems to enjoy all the music we’ve played, so I’m sure we’ll get there on the visual content when she has the ability to, like, see it.

Here are a few pictures taken throughout the past six weeks. Most were taken by me or Jonathan on our phones or with our Canon Rebel; the hospital ones were taken by our friend and professional photographer Sarah.

Note that this post is the 1000th published post on The Frame. I think that’s appropriate. :)

Observant readers may have noticed that the last post on The Frame is dated something like three months ago, which essentially means I’ve been on unannounced hiatus for a while. If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, there’s a good chance you already know my big news, but as I’m starting to get the writing bug again and want to get back into the blog, a bit of an explanation seemed to be in order. My husband Jonathan and I are expecting our first child next March, so the last few months have been spent doing a lot of sleeping and resting as I get used to sharing my body with another person, and the last few weeks have been spent moving into a new apartment with shorter commutes and bigger rooms for all the baby stuff we’ll be acquiring very soon.

Things seem to be settling into more of a routine now, though, and I’m hoping to at least keep up a little better with movie watching and writing than I have been. We found out a few weeks ago that it’s a girl, and we’re pretty stoked to share our love of everything movies with her. (To the question I’m learning is inevitable: yes, we have a name picked out, but we’re keeping it to ourselves for now.) I’m sure as she grows old enough to start watching movies with us, I’ll be posting more about her and the movies we’re watching with her.

I know it’s only a few weeks after my post about our engagement photos, but now there are wedding photos. As previously stated, our photographer is amazing and decided to put together a slideshow of pictures, blending preparations and wedding and reception all together in what is really a wonderful portrait of a wonderful afternoon. Everything turned out exactly how we wanted it, and I couldn’t ask for a better representation than Sarah gave us.

The song is “True Love Will Find You in the End,” a Daniel Johnston song as covered by Mates of State. We chose it not only because, well, it fits us pretty well, but also because Mates of State was the first band Jonathan and I saw together, back in July 2010. We weren’t dating yet at that point, but I think it was already on both of our minds. Mates of State were touring their Crushes album that year, a collection of covers of which this is the last on the record. They’re all great, but I think this one will always hold a special place in our hearts. Especially now, of course!

(for the record, the children are not ours – we had our whole church, which is about half kids, out for the wedding)

I don’t post too much solely personal stuff around here, though I do let it seep in a lot when I’m talking about movies or music or whatever else. This is worth its own post, though. My boyfriend Jonathan and I are now engaged, but not for long – we’re getting married this Sunday. “When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible,” right? (When Harry Met Sally… is one of the few romantic comedies we both actually like.)

I’ve never been very good with decisions. It’s part of my INTJ personality type, I know – we like to have all the options open and continue gathering data as long as possible. After all, we may find out a piece of data that totally changes what we think and affects that decision. Choosing schools, choosing places to live, choosing where to eat dinner, choosing what movie to rent – they’re all things that take me a long time and I second guess myself constantly.

Marrying Jonathan is the easiest decision I’ve ever made in my life. The idea of NOT being with him is just…unimaginable. Thankfully he feels the same way! Now Sunday can’t come fast enough.

Yesterday, our friend and photographer Sarah took us out for some engagement photos. In a parking garage. But it fits, because we’re both city people now, and the parks and fields she often shoots engagement photos in wouldn’t really fit us. Plus, this particular parking garage has really great mountain backdrops. She was able to find all the cool patches of light seeping through the edges of the garage. An unlikely location, perhaps, but I think it turned out beautifully.

Here are just a few of my favorite shots. Click here or on any of the images to see more at Sarah’s site.

I haven’t been keeping up very well the past couple of months at mentioning what I’m posting over on Row Three (aside from the crossposting of the DVD Triage and Film on TV posts, which are always posts here and there at the same time), so there’s a good chunk of them here, some of them a wee bit out of date. Sorry about that. But just in case you missed any of these posts over there, here’s some of what I’m been yapping about.

This is a film I saw at Cinefamily back in August almost by accident – it was a Wednesday night so I was volunteering, but they were showing this as part of a Cinespia-co-sponsored series of trippy films instead of their usual Wednesday night silents (in fact, I think the Wednesday night silents may be pretty much dead at this point, except for the monthly Silent Treatment series). I was a bit put out by there not being a silent, and I was planning to leave as soon as the movie started and my volunteering duties were over, but I found out it was directed by Milos Forman, and I’ve liked his other films, so I decided to check it out. So very glad I did, because I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. I’ve been meaning to post this particular scene, of a young hippie showing a bunch of parents how to smoke marijuana.

I’ve been eagerly anticipating the release of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim since I finished playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion back in, like, 2007. In other words, several years before Skyrim was even announced, I was dying to play this game. And so far, it’s pretty much everything I’d hoped it would be – almost exactly like Oblivion but with a few refinements (many of them pulled from Bethesda’s other major current-gen game, Fallout 3). I’ve been too busy with life to get much further in the game than I when I wrote this, but I’m no less eager to get home every night and try to spend a few hours in Skyrim.

Near the end of October, Cinefamily had a live band called Nilbog (presumably after the town in Troll 2) come in and perform their covers of classic horror scores, from John Carpenter to Bernard Herrmann to John Williams to Goblin, and after hearing them perform the music from Suspiria, I couldn’t get it out of my head and had to write this post about it. Mostly just an intro to the clip, though, which contains the first several minutes of Suspiria and already indicates just how important the Goblin score is to the feel of the film, and to the sound design of it in general.

I read this novel on Kurt’s suggestion, in a chat thread on Row Three about sci-fi novels. I had mentioned really enjoying Neal Stephenson’s Anathem and explained a bit about the plot, which involves a monastic order based on science rather than religion, but still incorporating a lot of elements from church history that I recognized and found fascinating. Kurt said I had to read A Canticle for Liebowitz stat, and he was totally right – this 1959 novel postulates a post-apocalyptic world in which a monastic order is the only thing saving the scientific writings of the twentieth century, and following it through the next several hundred years as the world rebuilds. Fascinating stuff for both sci-fi and history fans.

It’s easy to rail against remakes and despair that Hollywood never has any new ideas, but remakes have been around as long as movies have, and not all of them are bad! Here’s fifteen that are, in fact, not bad at all. They may not all be better than the originals, but I think they all deserve to be seen on their own terms, and they come from throughout Hollywood (and indeed, world cinema) history.

Rewatching Jaws recently reminded me how much I enjoy the quiet moments, the character-driven parts in between the shark attacks. Spielberg is so great on timing in his movies, but also at giving us something to care about and chew on besides the thrills and scares themselves. This scene with the three disparate shark-hunters in the boat drawn together (and to some degree, separated) by their scars is a perfect example of the vibe that Spielberg, Benchley, and the actors create so perfectly, making Jaws far more memorable than most creature features.

This evocative short played at Cinefamily before a Silent Treatment feature several weeks ago, and I was transfixed by it. It’s a very unique kind of animation that uses a box of thousands of pins that you can push in and out to create shapes when a light is shone on it from the side. I can’t imagine how difficult and time consuming creating this must’ve been, but it’s bizarre and gorgeous and creepy.

I told you some of these were really old – obviously we’re back at the beginning of October now, with a list of classic horror films that are light on gore, but heavy on atmospheric creepiness. I love horror films like this, and even though October is done for this year, it’s never too early to plan for next year!

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Many of my classic film blogger buddies are already at TCM Film Fest RIGHT NOW – I won’t be able to get there until Friday night, but in the meantime, here’s my preview post at Flickchart that runs down some of the films easily available to watch at home if you’re not able to go to the fest, and some films that aren’t easily available at all to whet your interest in making it to the fest next year. Hope to see you this year or a future one!

I need to do better about cross-referencing the stuff I write elsewhere in this little “elsewhere” column. That’s what it’s here for! I’m continuing to write TCM programming guides every month at the Flickchart blog (April’s will be…soon…I’m behind), and managing the Decades series, where we look back at films celebrating decade anniversaries this year.

For April, we looked back 90 years to 1927, a watershed year in the history of cinema with the exploding popularity of sound films, but also possibly the height of silent film artistry. All of the films featured in the post are silent (The Jazz Singer did not make Flickchart’s Global Top Ten), and it’s an embarrassment of riches. Check it out!

Video essayist Kogonada tends to let images and editing speak for themselves, and that’s precisely what he does here (with a slight bit of added Godard-esque typography, mostly to translate French audio), juxtaposing shots from various 1960-1967 Godard films to highlight recurring techniques. It’s pretty obvious to anyone who watches Godard’s early work that he had some specific things on his mind, but seeing it put together like this with excellent music and editing choices is mesmerizing and wonderful.

Chuck Jones is by far my favorite animation director of all time, and Tony Zhou is currently my favorite video essayist. Put them together? Yep, this is nine must-see minutes right here. And I’m also reminded that I need to get back to my Looney Tunes series that I started months ago and seemingly abandoned – but I didn’t, I promise! It’s just delayed.

“There’s an old story, borne out by production records, about [producer] Arthur Hornblow Jr. deciding to exert his power by handing [Billy] Wilder and [Charles] Brackett’s fully polished draft [of the screenplay for 1939’s Midnight] to a staff writer named Ken Englund. (Like many producers, then and now, Hornblow just wanted to put some more thumbprints on it.) Englund asked Hornblow what he was supposed to do with the script, since it looked good enough to him. “Rewrite it,” said Hornblow. Englund did as he was told and returned to Hornblow’s office with a new draft whereupon the producer told him precisely what the trouble was: it didn’t sound like Brackett and Wilder anymore. “You’ve lost the flavor of the original!” Hornblow declared. Englund then pointed out that Brackett and Wilder themselves were currently in their office doing nothing, so Hornblow turned the script back to them for further work. Charlie and Billy spent a few days playing cribbage and then handed in their original manuscript, retyped and doctored with a few minor changes. Hornblow loved it, and the film went into production.”

“For the refugees, a harsh accent was the least of their troubles. The precise cases, endless portmanteaus, and complex syntactical structure of the German language made their transition to English a strain. It required a thorough rearrangement of thought. In German, the verb usually comes at the end of the sentence; in English, it appears everywhere but. In German, conversation as well as written discourse, like a well-ordered stream through a series of civilized farms, flows. In English, such constructions are stilted. We like to get to the point and get there fast. For a displaced screenwriter – an adaptable one, anyway – American English lend itself to the kind of direct, immediate, constantly unfolding expressivity that German tended to thwart. Linguistically at least, American emotions are more straightforward. The violinist Yehudi Menuhin puts it this way: ‘When you start a sentence in German, you have to know at the beginning what the end will be. In English, you live the sentence through to the end. Emotion and thought go together. In German, they’re divorced. Everything is abstract.’

For a flexible storyteller like Billie Wilder – or Joseph Conrad or Vladimir Nabokov, for that matter – the new mix of languages was wondrous, pregnant with sounds and bursting with meaning. Wilder’s ear picked up our slang as well as our pragmatic syntax, and his inventive, hard-edged mind found twentieth-century poetry in them. Puns, jokes, verbal color, even the modern-sounding American tones and resonances one could make in the mouth – all were deeply engaging to the young writer-ranconteur. It was exciting for him to get laughs in a new language.”